Measurements are critical to the work performed by engineers. In their daily work, engineers constantly communicate, validate, and perform computations on the values of measurements. Engineers spend a significant portion of their time engaging in such activity. Furthermore, even a small error in a measurement of a product design, such as the span of an aircraft wing, or a value computed from that measurement, can cause serious defects in the product design and have other negative consequences.
Engineers often communicate measurements to each other by writing documents describing those measurements using phrases such as “the left wing of the F-16 aircraft has a span of 36 m.” Such documents are often written using conventional word processing software and stored in conventional word processing document formats. Engineers also create descriptions of measurements in a variety of other computer-readable forms, such as spreadsheets and email messages. The descriptions of measurements contained within such documents, spreadsheets, and email messages are often interspersed with other kinds of information, such as notes from the engineer to himself about how the measurement was obtained, what the purpose of the measurement is, or whether the measurement is actual or estimated.
Measurements represented in these and other conventional formats typically cannot be interpreted and processed by software for purposes of performing searches, reporting, validation or computations on the number measurement (e.g., 36 m in the example above), because the software cannot interpret the content of a phrase such as “the left wing of the F-16 aircraft has a span of 36 m,” particularly when such a phrase is interspersed with other, non-measurement-related text, in the same document. As a result, a memo containing such a phrase is useful primarily as a one-time communication from one engineer to another. To make further use of the same measurement, such as to perform a calculation involving the span of the F-16 aircraft's left wing, the engineer must re-enter the number “36” into a calculator or other calculation tool and manually perform the desired calculation.
Such calculations, however, can fail to provide the engineer, and other engineers, with important information. For example, assume that the engineer add 36 to 24 to produce the product 60 and then uses this result in further computations. Recall that the number 36 was derived from a measurement of the span of the left wing of an aircraft. If the number 24 was mistakenly derived from the span of the rudder, rather than from the span of the right wing, the resulting sum of 60 may be mathematically correct but fail to alert the engineer to the fact that the wrong calculation was performed. If the engineer communicates this result to other engineers, they too will remain unaware of the error.
Given the importance of measurements to engineers and others who work with measurements, the current state-of-the-art both requires users to engage in tedious manual data entry and calculation, and fails to provide additional functionality that would be useful to engineers in performance of their work.